Paul Starobin - A Most Wicked Conspiracy: The Last Great Swindle of the Gilded Age

O NE DAY NEAR THE END OF F EBRUARY 1900, A YOUNG MAN IN HIS twenties set out from his home near Dawson City, in the upper northwest of Canada, on his bicycle. Under a canopy of polar stars, the sun reluctant to appear at this time of year, he made his way along a rough narrow track on the frozen river used by sled dog teams, the trail spotted with the blood of the animals, their nails cracked and paws shredded by shards of ice. Mountainous ice jams halted his progress, forcing him to haul his bike aloft for many yards at a stretch. The wind lashed his face, and the temperature plunged as low as forty-five degrees below zero. The wolves, luckily, let him be as he pedaled across the length of the territory of Alaska, sustained by muskrat stew. Nearly five weeks and a thousand miles later, he arrived at his destination, the settlement of Nome on the Bering Sea coast. His body was badly bruised, his hands and elbows skinned and his left knee nearly fractured from numerous tumbles along the way, and his nose, along with the rubber tires of his bicycle and the oil in its bearings, frozen. But he had made it. The townspeople, accustomed to seeing the occasional dogsledder but never before a cyclist, greeted him with astonishment. The purpose of his journey, though, came as no surprise. Ed Jesson had made for Nome to get a head start on the gold-mining season. His gamble, for which he might have paid with his life, was to reach the town before the Bering thawed and steamers arrived with thousands of prospectors in frenzied search of the glittering treasure.

Alaskas gold was the talk and envy of the world. All signs pointed to abundant deposits in the Nome region. Indeed, prime discoveries already had been made, including by foreignersalienswhose claims some in the United States viewed as invalid. Americas gold was for Americans, the feeling went. On the US mainland, tens of thousands of men and more than a few women were making plans to get to Nome, the maddest dash of this kind since the Forty-Niners rushed California a half century earlier. For those afflicted with the fever, the trek was nowhere near as arduous as pedaling a bicycle across jagged ice. From Saint Paul on the Mississippi, getting across the Rockies and the Cascades all the way to Seattle on the Pacific took two and a half days by rail. From Seattles wharves, the voyage to Nome lasted about two weeks, icebergs permitting. Cape Nome offered the chance of your whole life, a flier distributed by the Great Northern rail line promised. Few men become rich by slow economy. Fortunes are made by men of nerve and decision who take advantage of opportunities WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE A MILLIONAIRE?

Most tantalizing of all, treasure seekers could literally find Cape Nomes gold on the beach, in flakes mixed with the ruby-colored sands stretching for many miles along the coast. Equipped with nothing more than a shovel and a crude, cradle-like wood box, known as a rocker, for filtering out the unwanted materials, a miner could clear $100 in a single days work, more than enough to cover the cost of the Alaska expedition. Beyond the beach, just a few miles inland, larger veins of gold lay in deposits in the creeks running through tundra speckled with stunted willow trees and covered with snow for most months of the year. And beyond these confirmed discoveries lay a vast and still largely unexplored terrain, containing possibly even more gold.